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Probably the best thing to do if your gonna have all these sub-arenas / maps in Public 0 is remove private frequencies, especially if you want good basing action. One of the problem with Leviathans is that they offer nothing on a private frequency. They are not going for the flag are they? If they are 'forced' to join freq 0 or 1 at least they can help either team reclaim the flag.

"What is it? Um . . . what do you want it to be?" —Juzba, Izzet tinker

I have been playing since 1999 with a few breaks here and there and have seen good times and bad in TW pub, which is all I have ever played.

I appreciate the work that has gone into these suggestions but I feel they are more of a sticking plaster than address the core issues. I feel people in spec are afk most of the time apart from two or three for example.

Likewise, introducing events or mini games within the same map is interesting but will not increase player numbers - it will just group them together in the same room, the only difference being that they are playing different games. It will give an illusion of more people only, but I suspect the public basing activity will be more or less the same.

However the intentions I completely agree with - that is, to get more people playing.

My suggestions:

New players do get some help from ZH but all too often they are trolled in game and also in chat. It takes a few days to get up to speed and I wonder how many new players give up. With a stack of unfamiliar buttons to work out even just to fly shoot bomb warp attach etc I wonder if it is all too much for some.

Solutions? I feel players should be warned not to verbally abuse new players, or perhaps new players could have an icon or symbol next to their name.

Public basing

When the warping into base was introduced this was a genuinely worthwhile feature and when the basing is good, its really good. Good basing keeps players coming back, so I feel if time and resources are going to be invested, they should be spent enhancing the core game - public basing. The changing maps are good and it is these changes that are key to retaining and increasing the audience.

I feel the one element that could benefit from a serious enhancement is changes to each of the ships that come and go. Sporadic and random changes to ships lasting from a few seconds to a few hours could be really good. There are so many parameters and variables to experiment with the possibilities are endless. For example allow levs to have a spider attachment for an hour asa defence turret.

As long as a ship is always enhanced (never reduced) I feel it will always be received positively.

We have seen some experiments with ships recently but they seem to disappear as fast as they arrive, and players are never invited to feedback on these changes.

A lot of great ideas being tossed out and discussed here. Plus, many of the critiques have made us realize that we do need to alter things to make this realistic and setup for success. One thing I want to make clear is that this idea of including sub-games (base, wbduel, javduel) in the Public arena is separate from the issues people have with Pub itself (i.e. Levi's, private freqs, etc. This is not to say that discussion about those issues is not welcomed, because it is, but I just wanted to make it clear that the implementation of those possible changes to pub is separate from this other proposal.

Here are a few big points that I want to toss out there after reading responses here and speaking with people in-game about the idea:

1. Randomizing Teams - This is one of the big things that I think is going to be necessary. We don't want stacking, and we don't want a thousand messages spamming everyone every time someone gets added to the game, subbed, ship changed, switched, etc. For basing, we will still need a cap assigned for each team, who will handle subs, shipchanges, etc. For example, if we have 16 players ready to go for 8v8 basing, the teams will be randomized to 8v8 (all spiders) by the bot, and the captain will then change two people to shark and one person to terr. They can also change people to include specials (wb/jav/lanc), but no more than two per freq for 8v8.

My belief is that randomizing teams will streamline this whole process and make it inherently simple. A wbduel game is gearing up, simply secure your spot with !playwbduel or something similar, and then once the spots are filled, the bot will automatically randomize teams and start the game. For wbduel and javduel, we either will need to code in to the bot to include a feature that there's a player needed on Freq 1, type !enterwbduel to sub, this being for if someone ragequits, lags out too much, has to log off unexpectedly, etc in OR we will have to have a captain assigned for wbduel/javduel as well. The only reason I don't like the idea of the captain is because we might still have trolls subbing newer or less skilled players out for their buddies because of the randomizing of the teams. Hopefully it wouldn't be an issue, but with a lot of our players, I wouldn't be surprised? The flip side of the coin is that a lot of players are worried about some pub trolls screwing up these games on purpose, so maybe it is best to have a cap so that those players can be subbed if needed. Either way, we will need staff oversight on these games in order to smooth over these issues and take action if necessary. NEED FEEDBACK on randomizing teams, if you guys could take a moment to touch on it.

2. Once games (wbduel, javduel, basing) are ongoing, Freq messages will be utilized to lower the spam for the other players. The only arena messages that will be necessary are to canvas for a substitute for one of the games. Obviously, when a game is gearing up, arena messages will be used to advertise that players are needed, etc, but once a game is going, Freq message will be used.

3. Lots of players I've spoken to privately about this in game are concerned about lag issues this might present, with all of the sub-games possibly going on in the background. I'm going to defer this question to qan, as I don't know. I've already emailed him about it, so I'll either post his response to me up here, or he can chime in himself. I don't know if we will know the extent of lag change until it is actually implemented.

4. Scoreresets for these games. Wbduel and javduel require it - base doesn't necessarily. How can we work around this so that people don't have their pub K : D reset every time they play a javduel? Is it possible for the bot to just keep track of 10 deaths from their current death tally? Meaning, if my pub K : D is 501-300, the bot will know that I'm out of the game when my pub K : D reaches 310? I know this will make it harder for people to keep track of other players' deaths during the game, but the bots are now freq PMing when players reach 7, 8, 9 deaths so that will alleviate some of the issues. I deferred this to qan too, as it would be he who would have to tell me if it's possible and/or worthwhile to code this into the bot. Again, I just don't know.

5. Levis, Priv Freqs, etc: Like I said before, these are separate issues than the sub-games being included in pub. We all have our opinions on how pub should be...a lot of times, you can get infinite different opinions. It's tough to sift through all of them and really make any big changes, because you're just not sure how much player-base you will alienate. I know a lot of players like LTing, like hunting LTs, like fraying in center, etc, so it's hard for me to go ahead and say we should just eliminate leviathans, or chop off the bottom of the map to force people to base. I think there has to be some sort of compromise made on these issues, and I'm not sure what it is. I'll brainstorm a bit more about it and try to include some ideas. I do think that eliminating private freqs might be a good place to start, because as Moot (Hi Moot!) pointed out, at least an LT on a pub freq is sort of forced to assist their team rather than just obliterate both teams and cause people to rage out.

Last edited by Voth; 12-22-2016 at 10:53 AM.

Duel Pasta> great
Duel Pasta> I spilled juice on my face

TWLB Champion Season 12
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It's not that simple...right now we are gauging responses and trying to work through the barriers (and there are many that come up when doing something like this). I've spoken with qan a lot about this and from what he tells me, the biggest thing is thinking these things through to the point where he doesn't have to make game-day decisions in the code. Meaning...I'm putting this out there to thoroughly think through the idea with all of you, so that if we want to move ahead, qan can simply sit down and work on a thought out plan, rather than an idea that he has to modify on the fly while coding.

Bottom line: if the players want to give it a shot and it's reasonably do-able, qan will probably work on it for us. I'm trying to simplify things as much as possible to make it easily implemented. It's not an overnight change. We need the map modified, bot coding (the biggest undertaking), and staff to be briefed on overseeing this change positively and decisively.

EDIT: Don't want you to think that's a "when we get to it" kind of answer. I'm all for moving forward with this. I have Sysops listening and thinking about this idea. What I was asked to do is put it out to the public to get an idea of the interest and also to think through how we can work through barriers. I'm pushing as fast and hard as the system can move, so I'll try my best. Just please try to understand that qan has made it clear that this is NOT a simple tweak of existing code, and that this is not his full time job, so patience is asked for in the implementation.

Last edited by Voth; 12-22-2016 at 01:09 PM.

Duel Pasta> great
Duel Pasta> I spilled juice on my face

TWLB Champion Season 12
TWLJ Champion Season 11
TWLB All-Star Season 10
Best undeserved TWL title winner in Trench Wars history

I think the basing mini game idea isnt good. And instead we can make a few easy changes to pub to make the basing more fun.

No priv freqs
No mini weasel
Cut the bottom half off the map

This could be done now.

So if i was making the decision about this i would decide to do this stuff now.

The problem is, people play pub for different reasons which alters all the time. They might like to lt for abit, they might get bored and decide to hide in a weasle to annoy players. Because of this, i'm not sure restricting pub is a good idea. Pub should be made more fun and more competitive and spacebux should be worth collecting for something.

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Nothing will revitalize the game, its over. It will dwindle down to nothing. Just as the other zones did. You must just accept it and move on.

What you're gonna move base to the pub? All thats going to come out of that is, uncompetitive games and letting the cancer pubbers troll the base games. Which ultimately would be no different then playing pub its self.

The only way to fix this game is to advertise and NEW players. And eveyone knows noone wants to play this game in 2016, it takes way to long to learn and not to mention its boring as all hell with the small playerbase and no 30player elims/events running 24hours a day.

Oh and let me mention how fun it is for a newb playing agaist 10year vets and just getting fkn destoryed and trolled. Is there anyone left in this game that hasnt played 10plus years?? I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but its the hard truth.

What olde just said...Which brings me on to the final event...Battle Royals? What are your thoughts voththegoth?

But I feel as I'm SMIM I'll have to give a little help...Host events such as hunt, rabbit, conqurerr in pub. We do need to try and keep everything non leagues into one arena.

But adding to what olde said. We all got hooked on this old game because we didn't have the graphics or consoles back then. We seen a dip when then Xbox and ps2 was released, a dip when steam was released, a dip when wow was released, a dip when sertifi got staff, a dip when cod was released, a dip when the AVG age realised that fingering a vagina was more satisfying than a keyboard.

We have had good ideas over the ages and can try to move from rears down different avenues...Gaming pages on Facebook, such as The Gaming Bible...Why wouldn't they want to do a piece on the first ever online multiplayer game.
Why hasn't their been a master reset on names since 2003? Players will probably give up before even entering because all the names are taken...Reset names which havent been online in less than 3 years and has less than 500 hours usage. Who knows, might even bring back old players if they think they might lose names or squads or even gain them. Set a limit to only 5 names 5 squads per person. If they want to trade and then they can do it through a trading bot...Maybe this can be done through the system idk...There's some ideas from vys aka SMIM

Part of the reason i quit for some time. Nothing is changing. The game is the same old stale shit. Please do something new to this old ass game. The discussion about a new pub map, and a new system as a whole is a great start. Goodluck!

2:morph> serious question how does ass taste crip
2:cripple> dude it tastes amazing. especially when her liquid comes out after u pull out ur tongue out of her butthole
2:jebass> i gave a rim job wants got a pc of corn stuck to my tongue

The two posts above are sort of the crux of the issue. If not enough changes, some people get bored and leave. If too much changes, some people get angry and leave. The reason TW as a community has settled on very little changing (or, at any rate, slow, progressive changes) is because changing and not changing things both result in complaints. (On the whole, changes result in more, though.) I've been called some pretty awful names over the years for both doing things and not doing things, sometimes both within a very short time, which gives one a real appreciation for absurdity, as well as a gentle dose of humility to realize how difficult it is to please even half of the population.

"You're a gentleman," they used to say to him. "You shouldn't have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that's no occupation for a gentleman."
-Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment